kiss [OE] An action or event causing certain failure for an enterprise may be described as the kiss of death. Although the phrase is only recorded from the 1940s, it is thought to refer to a story in the Bible. In the biblical account of the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Judas Iscariot identified Jesus to the soldiers who would arrest him by greeting him with a kiss. The expression is often used of apparently beneficial or well-meaning actions that somehow tempt fate, and have the opposite result to that intended. A much earlier traditional expression for an act of betrayal, a Judas kiss, refers to the same story. More recent is the kiss of life [1960s] for mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.